Authors: Ralph Ellison
“Bledsoe, you’re a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in
private
when you think you’re unobserved! You’re a sneaking chitterling lover! I accuse you of indulging in a filthy habit, Bledsoe! Lug them out of there, Bledsoe! Lug them out so we can see! I accuse you before the eyes of the world!” And he lugs them out, yards of them, with mustard greens, and racks of pigs’ ears, and pork chops and black-eyed peas with dull accusing eyes.
I let out a wild laugh, almost choking over the yam as the scene spun before me. Why, with others present, it would be worse than if I had accused him of raping an old woman of ninety-nine years, weighing ninety pounds … blind in one eye and lame in the hip! Bledsoe would disintegrate, disinflate! With a profound sigh he’d drop his head in shame. He’d lose caste. The weekly newspapers would attack him. The captions over his picture:
Prominent Educator Reverts to Field-Niggerism!
His rivals would denounce him as a bad example for the youth. Editorials would demand that he either recant or retire from public life. In the South his white folks would desert him; he would be discussed far and wide, and all of the trustees’ money couldn’t prop up his sagging prestige. He’d end up an exile washing dishes at the Automat. For down South he’d be unable to get a job on the honey wagon.
This is all very wild and childish, I thought, but to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am! I wolfed down the yam and ran back to the old man and handed him twenty cents. “Give me two more,” I said.
“Sho, all you want, long as I got ’em. I can see you a serious yam eater, young fellow. You eating them right away?”
“As soon as you give them to me,” I said.
“You want ’em buttered?”
“Please.”
“Sho, that way you can get the most out of ’em. Yes-suh,” he said, handing over the yams, “I can see you one of these old-fashioned yam eaters.”
“They’re my birthmark,” I said. “I yam what I am!”
“Then you must be from South Car’lina,” he said with a grin.
“South Carolina nothing, where I come from we really go for yams.”
“Come back tonight or tomorrow if you can eat some more,” he called after me. “My old lady’ll be out here with some hot sweet potato fried pies.”
Hot fried pies, I thought sadly, moving away. I would probably have indigestion if I ate one—now that I no longer felt ashamed of the things I had always loved, I probably could no longer digest very many of them. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn’t like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education—but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple …
But not yams, I had no problem concerning them and I would eat them whenever and wherever I took the notion. Continue on the yam level and life would be sweet—though somewhat yellowish. Yet the freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frostbitten.
The wind drove me into a side street where a group of boys had set a packing box afire. The gray smoke hung low and seemed to thicken as I walked with my head down and eyes closed, trying to avoid the fumes. My lungs began to pain; then emerging, wiping my eyes and coughing, I almost stumbled over it: It was piled in a jumble along the walk and over the curb into the street, like a lot of junk waiting to be hauled away. Then I saw the sullen-faced crowd, looking at a building where two white men were totting out a chair in which an old woman sat; who, as I watched, struck at them feebly with her fists. A motherly-looking old woman with her head tied in a handkerchief, wearing a man’s shoes and a man’s heavy blue sweater. It was startling: The crowd watching silently, the two white men lugging the chair and trying to dodge the blows and the old woman’s face streaming with angry tears as she thrashed at them with her fists. I couldn’t believe it. Something, a sense of foreboding, filled me, a quick sense of un-cleanliness.
“Leave us alone,” she cried, “leave us alone!” as the men pulled their heads out of range and sat her down abruptly at the curb, hurrying back in the building.
What on earth, I thought, looking above me. What on earth? The old woman sobbed, pointing to the stuff piled along the curb. “Just look what they doing to us. Just look,” looking straight at me. And I realized that what I’d taken for junk was actually worn household furnishings.
“Just look at what they’re doing,” she said, her teary eyes upon my face.
I looked away embarrassed, staring into the rapidly growing crowd. Faces were peering sullenly from the windows above. And now as the two men reappeared at the top of the steps carrying a battered chest of drawers, I saw a third man come out and stand behind them, pulling at his ear as he looked out over the crowd.
“Shake it up, you fellows,” he said, “shake it up. We don’t have all day.”
Then the men came down with the chest and I saw the crowd give way sullenly, the men trudging through, grunting and putting the chest at the curb, then returning into the building without a glance to left or right.
“Look at that,” a slender man near me said. “We ought to beat the hell out of those paddies!”
I looked silently into his face, taut and ashy in the cold, his eyes trained upon the men going up the steps.
“Sho, we ought to stop ’em,” another man said, “but ain’t that much nerve in the whole bunch.”
“There’s plenty nerve,” the slender man said. “All they need is someone to set it off. All they need is a leader. You mean
you
don’t have the nerve.”
“Who me?” the man said. “Who me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Just look,” the old woman said, “just look,” her face still turned toward mine. I turned away, edging closer to the two men.
“Who are those men?” I said, edging closer.
“Marshals or something. I don’t give a damn who they is.”
“Marshals, hell,” another man said. “Those guys doing all the toting ain’t nothing but trusties. Soon as they get through they’ll lock ’em up again.”
“I don’t care who they are, they got no business putting these old folks out on the sidewalk.”
“You mean they’re putting them out of their apartment?” I said. “They can do that up
here?”
“Man, where
you
from?” he said, swinging toward me. “What does it look they puttin’ them out of, a Pullman car? They being evicted!”
I was embarrassed; others were turning to stare. I had never seen an eviction. Someone snickered.
“Where did
he
come from?”
A flash of heat went over me and I turned. “Look, friend,” I said, hearing a hot edge coming into my voice. “I asked a civil question. If you don’t care to answer, don’t, but don’t try to make me look ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? Hell, all scobos is ridiculous. Who the hell is you?”
“Never mind, I am who I am. Just don’t beat up your gums at me,” I said, throwing him a newly acquired phrase.
Just then one of the men came down the steps with an armful of articles, and I saw the old woman reach up, yelling, “Take your hands off my Bible!” And the crowd surged forward.
The white man’s hot eyes swept the crowd. “Where, lady?” he said. “I don’t see any Bible.”
And I saw her snatch the Book from his arms, clutching it fiercely and sending forth a shriek. “They can come in your home and do what they want to you,” she said. “Just come stomping and jerk your life up by the roots! But this here’s the last straw. They ain’t going to bother with my Bible!”
The white man eyed the crowd. “Look, lady,” he said, more to the rest of us than to her, “I don’t want to do this, I
have
to do it. They sent me up here to do it. If it was left to me, you could stay here till hell freezes over …”
“These white folks, Lord. These white folks,” she moaned, her eyes turned toward the sky, as an old man pushed past me and went to her.
“Hon, Hon,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “It’s the agent, not these gentlemen. He’s the one. He says it’s in the bank, but you know he’s the one. We’ve done business with him for over twenty years.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “It’s all the white folks, not just one. They all against us. Every stinking low-down one of them.”
“She’s right!” a hoarse voice said. “She’s right! They
all
is!”
Something had been working fiercely inside me, and for a moment I had forgotten the rest of the crowd. Now I recognized a self-consciousness about them, as though they, we, were ashamed to witness the eviction, as though we were all unwilling intruders upon some shameful event; and thus we were careful not to touch or stare too hard at the effects that lined the curb; for we were witnesses of what we did not wish to see, though curious, fascinated, despite our shame, and through it all the old female, mind-plunging crying.
I looked at the old people, feeling my eyes burn, my throat tighten. The old woman’s sobbing was having a strange effect upon me—as when a child, seeing the tears of its parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry. I turned away, feeling myself being drawn to the old couple by a warm, dark, rising whirlpool of emotion which I feared. I was wary of what the sight of them crying there on the sidewalk was making me begin to feel. I wanted to leave, but was too ashamed to leave, was rapidly becoming too much a part of it to leave.
I turned aside and looked at the clutter of household objects which the two men continued to pile on the walk. And as the crowd pushed me I looked down to see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there; feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street. Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning. My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, “knocking bones,” used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-face minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums. Pots and pots of green plants were lined in the dirty snow, certain to die of the cold; ivy, canna, a tomato plant. And in a basket I saw a straightening comb, switches of false hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters against a background of dark red velvet, reading “God Bless Our Home”; and scattered across the top of a chiffonier were nuggets of High John the Conqueror, the lucky stone; and as I watched the white men put down a basket in which I saw a whiskey bottle filled with rock candy and camphor, a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine. And on a pillow several badly cracked pieces of delicate china, a commemorative plate celebrating the St. Louis World’s Fair … I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded with jet and mother-of-pearl.
The crowd surged as the white men came back, knocking over a drawer that spilled its contents in the snow at my feet. I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem, a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message “Grandma, I love you” in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric “Going back to my old cabin home”; a useless inhalant, a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot, a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher’s mitt, registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon. I felt nauseated. In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped “Void”; a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man with the caption:
MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED
.
I turned away, bending and searching the dirty snow for anything missed by my eyes, and my fingers closed upon something resting in a frozen footstep: a fragile paper, coming apart with age, written in black ink grown yellow. I read:
FREE PAPERS
.
Be it known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo, has been freed by me this sixth day of August, 1859. Signed: John Samuels. Macon.
… I folded it quickly, blotting out the single drop of melted snow which glistened on the yellowed page, and dropped it back into the drawer. My hands were trembling, my breath rasping as if I had run a long distance or come upon a coiled snake in a busy street.
It has been longer than that, further removed in time
, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn’t been. I replaced the drawer in the chest and pushed drunkenly to the curb.
But it wouldn’t come up, only a bitter spurt of gall filled my mouth and splattered the old folk’s possessions. I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms—all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been:
And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky—why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?